What Is the “Normal” File Hierarchy in Windows?

To the extent that anything is normal…

It’s surprisingly simple in concept. In practice, though, applications, including Windows itself, often conspire to make the file hierarchy confusing. That, in turn, can lead to a lot of lost, misplaced, or duplicate documents.

Let’s take a walk down the standard structure of files and folders that Windows assumes, encourages, and, in some cases, enforces.

But first, we need to make sure we understand some terminology.

Windows files and folders setup

In Windows’ typical file setup, drives hold folders, and folders hold files. Your main drive is usually C:, with key folders like C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, and C:\Users. Each user gets their own folder with subfolders (Documents, Pictures, etc.). However, programs and shortcuts often make things look confusing.

Drives, folders, and files

Let’s take a quick refresher on the basic building blocks of data storage.

Drives

Drives, AKA volumes or partitions, generally represent physical disk drives. These include the hard disk in your computer (whether HDD or SSD), parts (partitions) of the hard drive on your machine, USB thumb drives, network-connected drives, and more. Each drive typically represents a different physical entity.

Drives are most commonly referred to by letters of the alphabet followed by a colon. The most common is “C:”, the system drive (and often the only drive) in your computer.

Drives can contain folders and files.

Folders

Folders are a way of organizing the data stored on a drive. The metaphor is that of an old-style paper file folder into which you might place paper documents.

On your computer, folders can contain other folders (if you’ve ever used paper folders, you’ve almost certainly put a folder within a folder at one point or another), and files. Folders have names, not unlike what we might have written on a paper folder tab to identify its contents.

Files

Files contain actual data. The image above is a collection of files that each contain a single image. Files are given names to indicate what they contain. The characters after the last period in a file’s name is called its extension, and indicate what type of data the file contains. For example, .jpg indicates a JPEG-encoded image. Microsoft Word-formatted documents have a .docx extension. There are thousands of different file types, but they’re all just data collected on disk and organized into a single entity: a file.

Trees

Drives, folders, and files… that’s a lot to keep track of. There’s a model that makes it easier to conceptualize: the tree. You can see this represented graphically in Windows File Explorer.

“This PC” is kind of the base of our tree. In the example above, it contains four branches, each representing a drive on this machine. If I expand one of the branches by clicking on the “>” to its left, it displays more branches contained within.

Each folder or branch of the tree can be opened to expose its contents, and so on and so on. Folders can contain both more folders (referred to as subfolders) and files, but eventually you’ll reach a folder that contains only files.

You might consider files to be the leaves of the tree.

Tree notation

Those images are handy when navigating in Windows File Explorer. It’s a great graphical way to conceptualize how your files are organized and how to locate them. But it’s cumbersome when typing or otherwise referencing a single folder or file on your computer.

Instead, we use a path, or tree notation. It’s built like this:

• The drive letter is followed by a colon.
• Each folder (or branch) in turn.
• The name of the file.

Each of those elements is separated by a backslash (“\”).

So, looking at that last example image, the file “ash.exe” would have a full path notation of:

C:\cygwin\bin\ash.exe

On the C: drive, in the cygwin folder, in the bin folder, is the file “ash.exe”. That’s the full path to the file, often referred to as the canonical path.

Standard folders

Now we can answer your question about the “normal” file hierarchy.

By default, Windows installs to drive C:.

It creates the following folders (among others):

• C:\Program Files: Installed programs
• C:\Program Files (x86): More installed programs
• C:\Users: Files associated with the user accounts on the machine
• C:\Windows: The files making up Windows itself

If you look inside of C:\Windows, you’ll see many more standard folders (for example, SYSTEM and SYSTEM32) and many files.

C:\Users is where we want to look next.

User folders

Each account capable of signing into the machine is given a subfolder within C:\Users.

My machine, shown above, has two login accounts: “lnote”, which is the first five characters of the email address associated with my Microsoft account, and “leon”, which is a local machine account. The other folders are used by Windows for various purposes. (The Default folder, which is normally hidden, includes default settings for new accounts, Public is a folder for sharing things between accounts, and so on.1).

This allows different users to have separate collections of files that only they can access. By default, for example, the user “lnote” cannot access the files stored within the “leon” folder.

I often refer to your login ID as “%USERNAME%”, which, if used literally, is replaced by Windows with your current username. In my case, C:\Users\%USERNAME% is exactly the same as C:\Users\lnote.

Your user folder

If you open your user folder (sometimes referred to as your “home” folder), you’ll see a long list of folders and perhaps files. (In my case, that’s my Microsoft account folder, or “lnote”.)

There are several interesting aspects to this folder.

It contains your default folders, such as Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and the like. It contains additional folders, perhaps created by the software you’ve installed (“Google Drive Streaming” is a good example here), and more.

It also normally contains a folder called OneDrive that contains the files you have stored in OneDrive. On this machine, I uninstalled OneDrive and renamed the folder “OneDrive-” to see if anything would break.2

Related

Why I Avoid Windows’ Default Folders

I've avoided Windows' default folder layout for years. With recent assumptions Microsoft has made on how those folders should be treated, I'm glad I don't rely on them.
#172543

Your standard folders

When I talk about standard or default folders, it’s these that I’m talking about:

• Documents: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents
• Downloads: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Downloads
• Music: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Music
• Pictures: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Pictures
• Videos: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Videos

And that’s where any standard organization or hierarchy ends.

It’s completely up to you how you organize information within each folder. Some programs may have their own ideas, but that’s not a Windows standard as much as it is a particular program deciding how it wants to keep its data organized in your folders.

Shortcut confusion

One common source of confusion is when Windows tries to be helpful by hiding everything I’ve just described. The default setup of Windows File Explorer includes shortcuts to all those standard locations I’ve mentioned above.

These shortcuts completely obscure where the folders live on your disk. If Libraries are involved, they further confuse by referencing multiple different locations.

These shortcuts are also updated to be correct for the currently signed-in user. If “leon” is signed in on my machine, then the Documents shortcut refers to “C:\Users\leon\Documents”. If “lnote” is signed in, it’s “C:\Users\lnote\Documents”.

These shortcuts exist because in Microsoft’s mind you don’t need to know or care where your Documents folder is on your hard disk. Windows is trying to make your life easier. Unfortunately years of experience say otherwise: you really are better off and better organized if you know where things really are.

We have to talk about AppData

In theory, you should never need to know or care about one specific folder in your user folder: AppData.

It’s hidden by default. (There are options on the View menu to let you see hidden items.)

The intent is that programs running on your machine (AKA apps) store their data within this folder. This means that each user of your computer has a collection of data separate from other users.

Depending on what you have installed on your computer, AppData is a deep and complex collection of folders and sub-folders. Mine has over 100,000 folders and 250,000 files. I have a lot installed.

The most common question, of course, is what’s the deal with Local, LocalLow, and Roaming?

• Roaming: data placed within this folder is intended to synchronize across machines in a corporate network where users can log into different machines.
• Local: data placed within this folder stays on the local machine only.
• LocalLow: Apparently, this is intended for applications that have low trust and run with limited permissions. It’s also local to the machine only.

Applications tend to be inconsistent about which of these folders they use. The good news is that for most of us at home or in small businesses, the distinction is irrelevant.

As I said above, in theory you shouldn’t need to care about AppData. Unfortunately, it comes up just often enough when configuring programs, or diagnosing problems, that it’s something worth knowing about.

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